Machiavelli

A man so devious that when he wrote his seminal work, The Prince, about the treachery and backstabbing that could be used to gain power, he did the right thing: shove the book in a drawer and ignore it to the day he died. Later, other folks found the book and published it. (We'd be very pleased if these folks fucked each other over to get the book published, but life seldom presents such tidiness.)